“A greater power cannot be imagined” by Stephen Charnock

“This creation of things from nothing speaks an infinite power. The distance between nothing and being has been always counted so great that nothing but an infinite power can make such distances meet together, either for nothing to pass into being or being to return to nothing.

To have a thing arise from nothing was so difficult a text to those who were ignorant of the Scripture that they knew not how to fathom it and therefore laid it down as a certain rule that of nothing, nothing is made, which is true of a created power but not of an uncreated and almighty power.

A greater distance cannot be imagined than that which is between nothing and something, that which has no being and that which has. And a greater power cannot be imagined than that which brings something out of nothing.

We know not how to conceive a nothing, and afterward a being from that nothing, but we must remain swallowed up in admiration of the cause that gives it being and acknowledge it to be without any bounds and measures of greatness and power.

The further anything is from being, the more immense must that power be that brings it into being. It is not conceivable that the power of all the angels in one can give being to the smallest spire of grass.

To imagine, therefore, so small a thing as a bee, a fly, a grain of corn, or an atom of dust to be made of nothing would stupefy any creature in the consideration of it— much more to behold the heavens with all the troop of stars, the earth with all its embroidery, and the sea with all her inhabitants of fish; and man, the noblest creature of all, to arise out of the womb of mere emptiness.”

–Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. Mark Jones, Updated and Unabridged, vol. 2 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 2: 942-943.